Proud as she was at talking the seller down to $10, she had no idea the deal included a throw-in of the little creatures, which infested her daughter’s room within 72 hours. She immediately took the table outside and saturated it with Raid, then called an exterminator.

Yes, the exterminator, using heavy chemicals, got the bugs out of her daughter’s room.

“But they just migrated to our bedroom,” she said. “And then they were in the couch, on the floor where the cat lies, everywhere.”

We’ve heard you have to have the whole home treated for this reason. But instead of proceeding with conventional spraying, Thor found another option:

While extermination did not work, Thor discovered a new treatment from a company she happened to find working in her neighborhood.

Clean Zone, of Lisle, uses artificially made ozone to eliminate unwanted living organisms — from bugs to mold and bacteria. The company has machines about the size of a golf bag that actually create ozone, the kind we have naturally in our atmosphere.

They seal up a house or building, turn the machines on and go away for a while. The treatment area fills with ozone, which takes all oxygen from the air, effectively killing anything that needs oxygen to live.

Perhaps the best thing about the ozone treatment is it is natural, not chemical. After the treatment is over, the machines are turned off, the rooms unsealed, and within two hours the ozone converts to oxygen.

I searched the forums and it seems one PCO we know experimented with this, but it’s not clear whether he bought the CleanZone generator or something else. He constructed a test with bedbugs and said he had 50% mortality in 12 hours. He thought he would probably need at least one more unit. (He explained he already had experience with ozone generators in his kennels and was interested in trying them out for bedbugs.) The thread is “Ozone Experiment.”

According to this article, CleanZone was still getting partial results with bedbugs last year and was beginning tests to see how long to achieve 100% mortality.

Conservatively speaking, we can safety say that a home of approximately 2,500 sq. ft. will require an initial treatment of 14-16 hour utilizing up to four generators; that equates to one treatment per day.

I can already see how this is a) expensive and b) probably not available for apartment dwellers.

Still, the possible applications are so interesting. In a probable marketing ploy, this company offered to sanitize two Chicago buses or transit cars.